Are we getting more tolerant as a society? Or more intolerant? A little of both, as sentimentality mixes with credulity to create a toxic brew perhaps? Social workers, policemen, politicians, the poor sods who run Strictly Come Dancing and muddle up the voting, they all get it in the neck, sometimes from me too.

Bankers, there's another one, except that they were – many of them still are – paid a great deal to get things right which they got wrong – unlike social workers, who face more pressure for modest pay.

The sound of injured innocence from bankers over Bernard Madoff's alleged mega-fraud on Wall Street is deafening this morning. Blame the US regulator, says City "Superwoman" Nicola Horlick, who may well have been calling for less regulation until recently. There were warning signals flashing all over Madoff.

Friday's fraught jury verdict on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is another case in point. It was the subject of widespread dismay in Saturday's papers, most of it directed at the police and the instructions given to the jury by the coroner. Unfair? I thought so.

Obviously the shooting was the product of an organisational shambles at the Met, which didn't have the right information or procedures to guide its officers on the frontline that dangerous day, 22 July 2005.

But that wasn't the fault of the two specialist firearms unit coppers – Charlie 2 and Charlie 12 at the inquest – who pulled the trigger – or of Ivor, their colleague who grabbed what he thought was a suicide bomber in a bear-hug, a brave action on our collective behalf when you come to think of it.

That's presumably why the coroner, Sir Michael Wright (no jokes please) QC told the jurors they couldn't bring in a verdict of unlawful killing. They did what they did, on the basis of information received, to prevent a second tube massacre two weeks after 7/7. The soldiers who hesitated before shooting that 13-year-old suicide bomber in Afghanistan at the weekend won't be coming home.

In answering the 12 questions posed by Coroner Wright the jury didn't believe the police account of the killing – this on the basis of witness evidence. But the witnesses weren't all pumped up with adrenaline like the pursuit officers – not until afterwards anyway. It's hard to remember a car crash.

Pretty traumatic all round, I'd say. This surely wasn't the sort of case where the coppers shoot a drunk, or someone waving a stick, not a gun, or shoot a Chelsea banker in his own home instead of sitting him out.

Yet the jury also rejected – "couldn't decide" – the suggestion that the post 7/7 climate of fear in the capital, accentuated by the failed bombers of 21/7 – put pressure on the police. Which just goes to show that even conscientious juries can get things wrong, just like the coppers.

"The pressures people were operating under were unbelievable," Ken Livingstone said on Saturday. Quite so. And we were – briefly – relieved to hear they'd shot a bomber, were we not?

This is where I part company with Met-bashers this time, having bashed them myself over the arrest of Damian Green MP. They had plenty of time to think through that eccentric, disproportionate decision – split seconds to decide what to do about a terrorist suspect who turned out to be poor Mr de Menezes. The operational errors had already been made by others.

The Brazilian was a very unlucky man. But even that fact is complicated. The last time I checked he was working illegally in Britain, his visa having run out in 2003. If true (no one mentions it any more), that's no cause to shoot him, but it's surely a factor in any compensation case.

Menezes had left an impoverished corner of his native land, where police killings occur in their thousands each year – without benefit of an inquest at the Oval, to which the victim's family was invited for a two-week stay, apparently at Scotland Yard's expense.

Yet the sign outside the De Menezes family village of Gonzaga proclaims: "Here we value life." Oh really? Do the police know?

That's where the media-legal circus seems to have got out of hand. The "Justice for Jean" campaign hasn't finished yet. Judicial review of the coroner's ruling, a request for a police perjury inquiry, sackings at the Yard, prosecution of the trigger men, compensation – £300,000 has been mentioned – for the family, it goes on. The inquest alone cost £6m, not including those protest T-shirts.

Whose meter is running now? I don't know. That tenacious solicitor Gareth Pierce, always sounds a lovely person on the radio, but the less lovely Michael Mansfield QC doesn't come cheap. For whose benefit is this being done? If accountability means anything, there has been accountability, flawed and imperfect though it was. Police procedures have been changed and the long-standing practice of police officers writing collusive evidence banned. That's a form of "Justice for Jean" worth having.

We're back to where we were over the Green affair when some readers were offended when I mocked their insistence that the arrest proves that Britain is a police state. It doesn't and neither does the shooting of De Menezes, whom I didn't know and won't call "Jean Charles" like so many other people who didn't know him either.

Why mention that detail? Because it's sentimental and, as the coroner told the jury, it's best to put emotion to one side. Yes, I know he later contradicted himself on that very point. But coroners aren't perfect either. None of us is, a point always worth bearing in mind, even when contemplating bankers.